eCommerce development: the storefront is the easy half.
Stock that's wrong by the time an order lands, a tax rule nobody modelled, a 3PL that returns tracking numbers in a format the store can't read. Online retail breaks behind the checkout button, not in front of it — which is where we spend most of the build.
Event-driven stock sync6–16 weeksShopify Plus · WooCommerce · headless
eCommerce development is building and integrating the systems that sell, take payment and fulfil online. Canopus builds stores on Shopify Plus, WooCommerce and headless architectures — and connects them to the ERP, inventory, 3PL, tax and accounting systems that decide whether an order actually reaches a customer.
Where an online order actually goes
Six systems touch a single order between "Buy" and "Delivered". Every arrow below is a place we've seen orders silently disappear.
Scroll the diagram sideways to follow the full order path.
What we build on, and when each is right
We're not a Shopify agency or a WooCommerce agency. The platform is a consequence of your margin, your catalogue and your back office.
When you want to sell, not run infrastructure. Hosting, PCI scope, checkout and fraud are Shopify's problem. Best for D2C, fast launches and international selling with Markets.
WooCommerceWhen pricing logic is unusual, content and commerce are deeply intertwined, or per-transaction platform fees don't work at your margin. Full control, and full responsibility for security.
Headless commerceNext.js front end on a commerce API — Shopify Storefront API, Medusa or a custom backend. For unusual buying journeys, multi-brand estates and content-heavy merchandising.
B2B & trade orderingAccount price lists, credit terms, purchase-order checkout, approval chains and reorder-from-invoice. The features that decide whether trade customers use the site or keep phoning.
Subscriptions & recurringShopify Subscriptions, Recharge, or custom billing where the logic is genuinely unusual. Including the boring parts: pausing, skipping, dunning and prorated changes.
Marketplace & multi-vendorMultiple sellers, split payouts, vendor onboarding and commission handling — closer to SaaS development than to a store build, and priced that way.
Integrations we build most often
Named, because vague integration promises are how eCommerce quotes go wrong.
Payments & checkout
ERP, accounting & tax
Fulfilment & logistics
Merchandising & retention
Moving a store that already earns
Migrating a live store is the highest-risk work in eCommerce. The revenue doesn't pause while you do it.
The one that costs the most
Redirecting every discontinued product to the homepage. It's the default of most migration plugins, Google treats it as a soft 404, and a catalogue with a few thousand retired SKUs can lose a large share of its long-tail traffic in a fortnight. Mapping each one to its closest live equivalent is dull, manual work — and it's the difference between a migration nobody notices and a quarter spent recovering.
What usually goes wrong on eCommerce projects
Product data isn't ready
Descriptions in three formats, images at inconsistent sizes, variants encoded in the SKU string, and a spreadsheet that's the real source of truth. Catalogue preparation is routinely the longest task and rarely the quoted one.
How we handle it: we profile the real catalogue export in week one and price data preparation separately, so it can't quietly eat the build budget.
Twenty apps, one performance problem
Each Shopify app injects script into every page. A store with fifteen or twenty apps has an LCP problem no amount of theme optimisation will fix, and each app is also a data-processing agreement nobody reviewed.
How we handle it: the app list is audited as part of any speed work — what it does, what it costs in kilobytes, and whether the same job can be done in the theme.
Tax and duties discovered at launch
Selling into the EU, the UK and the GCC from one store means three different VAT treatments, IOSS registration questions and duty-inclusive pricing decisions. It's a finance problem that arrives as a technical emergency.
How we handle it: tax jurisdictions are a discovery question, not a launch surprise. Where it's genuinely complex we integrate a tax engine rather than hand-coding rates.
Nobody owns the stock number
The store says 4, the ERP says 2, the warehouse has 1 and someone reserved it for a trade order. Every oversell traces back to an unanswered question about which system is authoritative.
How we handle it: we make you pick the system of record for each field before writing sync code, and the reconciliation job alerts when reality disagrees with it.
Platforms, integration, migration and speed
How do you price an eCommerce build?
Catalogue condition and the number of systems the store has to agree with drive the cost, not the storefront design. A themed Shopify store with a clean product export and one payment gateway is different work from a Plus build reconciling stock across an ERP and a 3PL. We profile your real catalogue export and list every integration in a paid discovery, and you leave with a fixed written estimate and a scope document you own — whether or not you build it with us.
Shopify or WooCommerce — which is better?
Shopify when you want to sell rather than run infrastructure: hosting, PCI scope, checkout and fraud handling are theirs. WooCommerce when you need unusual pricing logic, deep WordPress content integration, or can't accept per-transaction platform fees at your margin. At high volume the Shopify fee stops being trivial — that's a spreadsheet question, not a technical one.
Can you connect the store to our ERP and warehouse?
Yes, and it's where most of the engineering goes. Stock, pricing, orders, invoices, returns and shipment status flowing between store, ERP and 3PL — with idempotent handling so a retried webhook can't duplicate an order, and a reconciliation job that catches drift nobody notices until stocktake. See API and system integration.
How do you replatform without losing search traffic?
Every product, collection and content URL is mapped to a destination before launch, with single-hop 301s and no chains. Discontinued products redirect to the closest live equivalent or their parent collection — never the homepage, which Google treats as a soft 404. We baseline first, then watch Search Console weekly for eight weeks.
Do you build subscription and B2B ordering?
Yes. Subscriptions through Shopify Subscriptions or Recharge, or built into a custom checkout where the billing logic is unusual. For B2B: account-specific price lists, credit terms, purchase-order checkout, approval flows and bulk reordering from past invoices.
Will the store be fast?
We hold storefronts to the same Core Web Vitals budget as every other build — LCP under 2.5s on a throttled mobile connection. On Shopify that mostly means being ruthless about apps: each one injects script, and a store with fifteen apps has a performance problem no theme optimisation will fix.
Do you run the marketing as well?
We can. Product feed management, Google Shopping, Meta catalogue ads, technical SEO for category and product pages, and conversion work sit under digital marketing. Plenty of clients take the build only and keep an existing agency — the store is built to be handed to anyone.
Who owns the store and the accounts?
You do. Shopify, payment gateway, domain and analytics accounts are yours from day one, and we're added as collaborators. Custom code and theme work transfer with full IP assignment on payment — there's no component licensed back to us.
Related services
Tell us what happens after someone clicks Buy.
Which systems have to agree, who fulfils, and where the stock number really lives. That's the part that decides the quote — an engineer replies within one business day.
- Email — [email protected]
- Phone / WhatsApp — +91 817 979 7732
- Existing store? Ask for a speed and app audit